Imaging devices require a user's active participation in connection with operations. The extent of required participation differs, depending on the type of device. One type of operation involves setup procedures. These can include setting various default conditions, selecting options for a particular job such as paper size or orientation, color calibration steps, entering source or destination information, and various other selections. A different kind of operation that advantageously relies on actions by the user may involve diagnostic and fault recovery procedures, namely identifying, isolating and correcting operational problems, a familiar example being the clearing of paper jams. A third type of operation may concern regular maintenance procedures such as changing supplies of ink, toner or other marking material, cleaning print heads and paper paths, etc.
Help screens have long been employed to provide direction to a user in setting up the device, handling regular maintenance, and responding to faults. Sensed deficiencies in initial condition, and operational faults during printer operation, advantageously generate an alarm and may also present information on the nature and location of the fault to assist the operator in remedying faults, if possible. In some previously known systems, instructions for clearing faults in an imaging device were in the form of text messages indicating the source of the fault and/or one or multiple still images depicting the section of the device in need of attention that were provided, for example, on the exterior surface of the imaging device or on a user interface display screen. Still images were presented to the user comic strip style or presented one after another (e.g., in gif format). While still images may be sufficient for simple faults such as an out-of-paper condition, they may not be adequate for more complicated faults such as a paper jam. Clearing such a fault may require multiple steps such as: opening a door, turning a lever clockwise, pulling out a mechanism, lifting a cover, etc. Such a sequence of steps is difficult for an operator to follow even when multiple still images are provided to illustrate each step because the images do not convey information about the movements required to accomplish the task.
Another approach that has been utilized to provide instructions to an operator is the use of live-action videos depicting an operator interacting with the imaging device in a prescribed manner intended to remediate, or clear, the fault condition. Live-action instructional videos may be effective in assisting an operator in interacting with an imaging device. However, in considering the use of live-action footage for directing users in interacting with an imaging device, a number of issues were found that made the use of live-action videos unwieldy and expensive. For example, the production of live-action videos may be expensive due to the multiple people, e.g. actors, camera people, etc., the use of a particular locale, pre-production tasks such as story-boarding, filming the video, post-production tasks such as editing, that are involved. In addition, as an iterative process, where instruction is story-boarded, a sequence is produced, implemented and then validated in usability testing, changes are likely to be made to an instruction after the initial delivery—to refine and enhance the clarity of the instruction based on user feedback. The use of live action video would require that the entire instruction be recreated in order to account for changes in fault clearance methodology. In addition, there are many details of imaging device operation that are not easily captured in a live-action video, such as the way baffles snap open, or crash down, renditions of media, such as paper, and how it crumples, for example. Thus, live-action videos may still have to undergo significant editing after the video has been captured to add graphical overlays and the like to the videos so that a user can understand what's going on the video and be able to follow its instructions.